She's Gotta Have It

In Brooklyn, the graphic artist Nola Darling is seeing three men at once. All three want her to themselves; she has no intention of giving up her independence. It is Spike Lee's first feature. The budget was 175,000 dollars and it was shot in twelve days across Brooklyn in the summer of 1985, on Super 16mm and later blown up to 35mm. It is mostly black and white with a single colour sequence. Tracy Camilla Johns plays Nola. The three suitors are Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell and Lee himself as Mars Blackmon. Ernest Dickerson shot it and the director's father Bill Lee wrote the music. It took 7.1 million dollars domestically. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 91 percent, the consensus saying it set the template for the groundbreaking work that followed. The New York Times credited it with ushering in the American independent film movement of the eighties. It entered the National Film Registry in 2019 and influenced directors including Quentin Tarantino. A Netflix series ran for two seasons between 2017 and 2019. Lee later regretted the rape scene in the film, calling it stupid and acknowledging his immaturity in handling the subject. Who it is for: anyone curious about where American independent cinema began. Who it is not for: viewers who need the film's view of its central woman to be unproblematic. The director himself walked it back.